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Three recent young adult novels feature teenage girls seeking out alternative realities, and discovering ones soothing and hellish. The books also introduce readers to realities such as the hardships of street life in the Downtown Eastside and the homeless in Victoria and Vancouver.

Rabbit Ears

By Maggie de Vries

Harper Trophy Canada

Thirteen-year-old Kaya seeks an alternative reality from the unhappiness at home and cruelties of high school. Kaya, who was adopted as an infant, considers herself a misfit in comparison to her older sister Beth, who seemingly has everything Kaya lacks — friends, good grades and high regard from everyone. She is alone in her otherness and grief since the family finds it too raw to share their feelings.

At school, the multiracial Kaya faces racist taunts, rejection and bullying; her yearning for friendship makes her vulnerable to the overtures of two girls who befriend her only to set her up for a beating. Her rescuer, a tough teen named Michelle, invites Kaya to come with her when she cuts class to hang out in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

While her mother loses herself in working long shifts, Beth in overeating and studying magic, Kaya loses herself in the rush of seeking adventures. When running away for days isn’t enough to quell her need to escape her life, she decides to shoot up heroin like Michelle. The “happiness, strength and clarity” it delivers — however short-lived — seems worth being pimped out by her supplier, and then becoming a sex worker on the dangerous strip of Hastings Street.

In Rabbit Ears, Maggie de Vries has imagined an alternative reality to the fate of her adopted sister Sarah, murdered by serial killer Robert Pickton. (Her Governor General Literary Award-nominated memoir, Missing Sarah, documented Sarah’s life and de Vries’ search for her. The DNA of Sarah, a sex worker who went missing in 1998, was discovered on Pickton’s farm in 2002.) A friend of Sarah’s contacted de Vries after reading her memoir, telling her that Sarah had been sexually abused for years by a man in a neighbourhood. “I found myself haunted by this new information,” de Vries writes in an afterword, the information illuminating the secret that she believes so self-destructively haunted Sarah.

“Rabbit Ears arose from that haunting. I wanted to tell a story about a girl who went through what my sister went through, but survived.”

Kaya is an intensely rendered presence — aware of her own conflicting impulses and emotions, and as confused by them as those who love her. She has an in-your-face defiant bravado, part of her adventurous nature and appetite for experiences, both good and bad. What drives her though is self-hatred and anger. Kaya undertakes sex work to pay for her heroin addiction; she, like many teens, is cloaked by her sense of invincibility, a nearsightedness where there is only the present. She listens to no one, not even the real-life Sarah, warm, streetwise, whom de Vries briefly writes into the story. Sarah tries but fails to get Kaya to really see the consequences of the life she is choosing to live.

De Vries has Kaya narrate her story in a second-person present. That deftly etched second-person voice — poetic, tactile, and compelling — is that voice that we talk to ourselves, the voice we use to admonish ourselves, keep ourselves company and to observe and distance ourselves from our conscience and hurt.

Beth narrates her story in the first-person present. Just as Kaya’s narration comes across an utterly persuasive evocative of her personality and perspective, so does Beth’s, whose sombre, careful narration seethes with loss and shame in her repressed way. Their bond is complicated and tumultuous. Beth feels protective yet resentful of all the attention and care Kaya gets, wants to give up on searching for and saving her, but can’t.

Each has their secrets which de Vries paces out gradually. This makes their revelations moving and realistic — avoiding the trap of solving lives at the conclusion as if they could be fixed happily. Instead, she concludes with an encouraging resolution that is truthful in its tentativeness.

Outside In

By Sarah Ellis

Groundwood Books

For most of Lynn’s childhood, her mother Shakti has evolved, as she sees it, “bounced” as Lynn bluntly puts it, from one job to the next, one man to another, taken up and abandoned various social causes and alternative lifestyles.

In Sarah Ellis’s latest YA novel Outside In, Lynn, the adult-minded daughter of a perpetually adolescent single mom, yearns for ordinary family life with “milk in the fridge, friends over to play … air without jangle.”

She has kind of achieved a version of what her friends take for granted when Shakti moves in with Clive who is caring and responsible. Then that safe haven is torpedoed and the familiar frightening chaos returns after Shakti has an affair with the young husband of a co-worker, loses Clive and impulsively quits her job soon afterward because she can’t handle the hostile atmosphere she has created at work.

Even a temporary escape for Lynn from the latest “Shakti drama” to a music festival with the school choir is thwarted since Shakti forgot to mail Lynn’s passport application. Wanting more than anything to be transported to an alternative reality, she finds one in a most unexpected place — an abandoned concrete bunker under a reservoir — brought there by Blossom, a girl her age. Bloom appeared like a sprightly guardian angel at a bus stop, saving Lynn from choking on a candy by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre. She lives there with the other “Underlanders” — her ‘father,” the avuncular Fossick, and two “brothers”: Tron, a rebellious Goth, and the shy, artistic Larch. Fossick welcomes Lynn to their “Arcadia.”

Ellis is one of those rare authors who are as gifted at writing criticism (she is a longtime, regular reviewer of children’s literature for Horn Magazine and many other publications) as she is at writing fiction — 16 books to date.

Her absorbing, thought-provoking storyline is an artfully spun mesh of the components of family drama, social commentary and resonant literary allusions — The Borrowers by Mary Norton and Alice in Wonderland (Carroll’s initial title was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground).

Fossick is more of a parent than Shakti ever will be, and their “family” more a real one than many a “real” one — nurturing and altruistic — even with the inevitable tensions. As in many of Ellis’s novels, the drama and conflict inherent in all relationships — friendship and familial — propel the plot with velocity and depth.

The Underlanders live by gathering and recycling the castoffs of “citizens” (dividing them into throwaways or keepsakes), by communal bartering of goods and services — the embodiment of the social activism that Shakti mouths. They delight Lynn, who regards this Borrower type family and their inventive, practical existence as her fantasy family come to life. Visiting their world is like entering a storybook utopia.

However, Lynn learns their lives are grounded in harsh realities as her own. They were all orphaned throwaways — Blossom abandoned as a baby; Tron, a runaway from abusive foster care and Larch, from brutal treatment in a mental health facility — rescued and recycled in a way you could say by the Prospero-like Fossick, a former university professor. They can depend on him unlike Lynn who has grown up warily reading Shakti for the next “signals of a meltdown.”

Lynn is an anchor of reality — in her mother’s life, like or not, and in the novel. She is smart, perceptive, self-aware, and churning with emotion and need. The portrayal of Lynn’s relationship with Shakti is particularly sharp and knowing, Lynn nailing, vivid detail by detail, the self-absorbed, drama queen essence of Shakti “wound up, a little crazy, like a preschooler on top of a sand pile.” It’s no surprise really, when Shakti publicly reveals the location of the Underlanders — a secret she swore to keep.

Throughout Lynn is shown to be mature enough to know, even though it hurts, that Shakti can’t be the mother she needs. The betrayal is piercing, although Lynn forgives her mother in a cursory exchange which seems a false palliative — letting Shakti off the hook, evading accountability yet again in an otherwise emotionally truthful storyline.

Bad parents — obtuse, selfish, inadequate, terrible, abound in children’s fiction. Occasionally, they are what they are — sometimes there is more honest consolation and emotional release for teen characters (think of Betsy Byers’s superb The Pinballs) and readers in keeping to that truth than continuing to pretend, and hope, otherwise.

Skylark

By Sara Cassidy

Orca Soundings

In Sara Cassidy’s fifth teen novel Skylark, Angie Kilpatrick is living with her older brother Clem and her mother in their car while on the waiting list for public housing. She creates alternatives to the privations of this reality in the poetry she writes and performs in weekly slam poetry contest.

Cassidy’s novel was written for the Orca Soundings series for struggling teen readers in the standard format of short, fast-paced chapters and clear, uncomplicated prose. In her beautifully written story she demonstrates how much can be said, shown and suggested in compact fashion in this novel which is full bodied in its every aspect.

Readers are aware — even before Angie herself — of her poetic gifts by her deft facility with metaphor, analogy and striking description. A haunt of Angie’s family when they had a home and were a family (her unemployed father has left in search of work in Ontario) was a local coffee shop.

Looking to get out of the car one evening, they return there on the night of the weekly slam poetry contest. Inspired by the contestants’ poetry, the atmosphere and the audience’s enthusiastic participation, Angie decides to write a poem to perform there.

In succinct, reverberating episodic chapters that merge past with present, Angie relates how her family came to be living in a car, what it is like for them to live there and her hope for a home. Angie’s narration reads like confessional/prose poem monologue. Cassidy dramatizes Angie’s creative process by showing Angie drawing from her life for her poetry, the writing which becomes “something like a home” to her.

Angie’s first poem is about how condescending pity is. She knows what it is like to be shamed, as if their and others’ struggles are somehow their fault. “We were neither lazy nor criminal, only unlucky,” she states.

She and her brother try their best to take care of their Buick Skylark: “We respect the time the owner has spent rubbing cream into its leather, vacuuming.”

These are “people you’d trust your life to,” to use the title of Bronwen Wallace’s short story collection, a favourite writer of Angie’s — drawn by Cassidy with deeply affectingly sensitivity.

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Book reviews: In search of alternative realities with Rabbit Ears, Outside In and Skylark

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